“Elise?”
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I want you to tell him how insane this is.”
She rubbed her chin and turned her head.
“I see ash,” Michael said, “not people coming to take the food.”
Aidan’s voice cut through. “Is that why we covered the windows?”
Silence. Sean licked his lips. “There are bad people out there, bud.”
“You’re going to scare him,” Elise said.
Aidan stood up. “I’m not scared.”
“You don’t have to be,” Sean said, “because we’re here to protect you. All of us.”
“Can we maybe talk about this later?” Kelly said. “This’s too much.”
“Dad, we just boarded up our home to keep people out,” Molly said. “People I know are out there right now. My friends. My—”
A tinge of guilt hit Michael. He had forgotten about her boyfriend. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t much care about anyone else outside the room. His mom and dad were long dead. No real friends. Molly, though, had people she cared about close by.
“Then maybe we can talk later,” Michael said.
Everyone agreed silently. Sean said, “Let’s all try to get some sleep.”
With a rifle slung on his shoulder, Sean turned to his daughter. They shared a long hug before he kissed her forehead. The weak smile drained from her face when Sean couldn’t see. But Michael saw. Her smile returned when Sean looked at her.
“Take your brother upstairs, all right?”
She nodded and took Aidan’s hand. The other adults watched them ascend and then stood quiet for a few tense seconds. He watched the back of Sean’s head and waited for him to speak. When he turned, he looked tired, like his shoulders were worn down and curved from carrying a heavy weight. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” Sean said.
“We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I won’t stop you.”
“You won’t?”
“It’s not my business,” he said. “Just don’t come back.”
Elise gripped Sean’s arm.
“Excuse me?” Michael said.
“You can stay. But if you leave, you’re on your own. Nobody gets back into the house.”
He huffed. “Unbelievable.”
“Realistic.”
“You think I’m doomed if I leave?”
“It’s your choice.”
Sean led the way up the stairs and out of sight. Elise didn’t look at Michael. He rubbed his eyes, feeling incredulous. There was no way he was the only one seeing it—the delusion. He couldn’t be the only one. Kelly had to see something. She…
Kelly disappeared into the guest room and closed the door. He plopped down on the couch instead of following her.
He couldn’t find the remote, so he watched the TV in silence. There was footage of people in lines at grocery stores. Civilized. Then a map came up of the areas under a state of emergency. Most of the continent covered in red. He leaned forward on the couch. It was everywhere. More footage rolled. Gray-colored dust fell like a blizzard in Kansas, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio. Snowplows were useless. Cars crashed in the road.
The signal fuzzed for a second and the image turned to black.
He walked to the TV and shut it off. As he came back, his eyes rested on the shotgun laying on the coffee table. The barrel glimmered in the light of the lamp and dimming fire. He put a hand on it, fingers curling around the barrel, and something leaped in his chest.
He stepped back and sat at the far end of the couch, away from it. It wasn’t necessary—the guns, the worry. Nobody was coming to Appalachian Pennsylvania to take anything from them. Yet, his eyes kept wandering back to the gun, and his heart pounded every time he looked at it.
Every time.
Chapter 9
SEAN WAS ALREADY awake when the power went out.
It wasn’t the first time. A week after the ash started falling, the power had ceased without explanation. It hadn’t bothered him then, not with the generator, solar panels, batteries, and extra fuel he had to power his home.
But this time it did.
He had been lying in bed staring at a digital alarm clock across the room, its red pixels like a burning coil against the dark. Each passing minute seemed longer than the last. The sleeping pills were always an option, but they didn’t bring real sleep. They just knocked him out. He had a supply that would last him a few months even, but he feared dependency when there would be no refills.
As the weeks had passed, the reality had sunk in further: the ash would not stop falling. Everyone had guessed it would stop after a few days, but two weeks had passed. Then two more. It would stop a few days and then sprinkle again. There wasn’t much ash accumulation, just a dusting, but the sight of it falling brought back feelings of helplessness. When the live radio broadcasts stopped, he had seen the situation with grave clarity. It was day forty-five.
No new pills ever again. No rescue. No relief coming.
He hadn’t slept well in weeks, just an hour or two here and there. He stared up at the ceiling and thought he saw his own breath, though it was nonsense. With the wood-burning furnace running less, most of the house was cold, but not frigid. Not yet.
When he looked back to the clock, the piercing red coils zapped off, leaving only a ghost image of the numbers. The generator had run out of fuel. The solar panels—which he had to risk his body often getting on the roof to clean—weren’t picking up enough sun, so he had to run the generator every other day. Even that thought brought doom and gloom. He would refill it in the morning, but there would be nothing to replace the spent fuel in the main supply.
No relief coming.
He pulled the covers closer to his neck.
“You awake?” Elise whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Can’t sleep again?”
He touched her shoulder. “You cold?”
“A little.”
“Come over here.”
His limbs were stiff and restless, but he allowed her to shuffle in next to him. Elise had been complaining that he had been distant. And he had been. So, he let her rest her head on his shoulder and pulled her close. Her hot exhales grazed his chest, and he imagined her mouth, and her tongue. Her tongue further down…
He snapped out of it. She didn’t want it. A cruel irony in that. She thought he was distant, but she never wanted to have sex. And she wondered why.
“Did the power go out?” Elise asked.
“Yep.”
“Wasn’t Molly supposed to fill the generator up before bed?”
“I asked her to.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what’s going on with her. It’s like she’s not here, you know?”
He had noticed the same thing. “If I could, I would hide in my room all the time too.”
“She didn’t say a word at dinner.”
“She hasn’t said a word all week. I don’t know what I did.”
“You didn’t do anything. Things are just hard, you know?”
Sean grunted.
“Is that what’s keeping you awake?”
He stayed silent. That and more. The slow-moving time, the diminishing resources, the lack of sleep itself. That was the most frustrating. He was upset that he couldn’t sleep, and so it caused him to get even less sleep. Then he grew more frustrated. Like a sick game being played on him.
There were also the ungrateful guests downstairs. He never saw them unless it was time to eat. All they did was eat and sleep like there was no sacrifice involved in providing for them.
“I weighed Aidan yesterday,” Elise said.
“Do I even want to know?”
“I think he needs to eat more.”
“We can do that.”
It sounded like she wanted to say more, but she didn’t. They lay quiet, listening to the wind against the walls. He finally said, “I never thought it would go down like this.”